Fifty years ago in the "Deep Freeze" winter of 1962/63,
Cosens & Co of Weymouth boosted their refit work by securing contracts to do
major overhauls on two paddle steamers alien to the port. The first to arrive
was the British Railways's Portsmouth to Ryde ferry Sandown, pictured
here passing through the Town Bridge on 15th October 1962, on her way to berth
outside Cosens's workshops in the Backwater.

A month later, with work completed, she
moved out and P & A Campbell's Bristol Channel paddle steamer Bristol Queen
moved in. Here she is, in a wonderfully atmospheric picture taken by
one of the founder members of the PSPS, Bernard Cox, on 13th November 1962,
sandwiched between the Sandown waiting to leave for Newhaven and
Consul having just completed her last season for Cosens and laid up outside
Haymans for the winter.

With the Embassy already in the
Backwater that makes four paddle steamers in the Harbour all on one day. What a
delight. And by rights it should actually have been five! The Princess
Elizabeth regularly wintered at Weymouth from 1961 to 1968 but 1962 was the
exception. After a dreadful season running from Bournemouth she saved the cost
of steaming home along the Dorset Coast and laid up on a cheap buoy in Poole
Harbour, just off Hamworthy, instead. So four it was.

The local press was in effulgent form with headlines
billing the Sandown as a "Giant", which I suppose she was compared with
the Consul, and the Bristol Queen as "Queen' of England's paddle
steamers" a title which pleased the English whilst allowing those north of the
border to continue their dreams of a higher status for their own Clyde flyers.

A journalist came aboard and interviewed Bristol
Queen's Chief Engineer Jack Rowles. "It is one of those 24 hour day jobs for
the boats don't rest while the summer season is on." he said. "And it can be a
bad weather job too with the boat rolling beam on on the swell coming up Channel
and no other way to go about it because she has to cross with the paddles straining as they dip into the swell. It can be a tricky job too - witness the
slight damage to the housing over the port paddle. The tide can be difficult in
the Channel and at some piers a man with white-painted flaps has to guide the
captain in the direction of the current. We bumped because at the last moment
the tide changed. It turned in a manner of minutes. And the storms can come up
quick. You can get 10ft, 15ft waves."

Works Manager Mr Herbert Gill, who spent a lifetime with
Cosens, was also probed. "This is a different age today." he said. "Nobody is
satisfied to go slowly along the coast looking at the countryside and the
coastline. They want to get on quickly. This is a fast age." He then took the
reporter on a tour of Cosens's offices with their varnished deal planked walls
and glass-cased paddle steamer models. "The wood has been varnished every five
years since it was put in place seventy years ago" he said. "It's Dickensian.
I'd like to see it done in a nice pastel shade, like we painted the office
downstairs. It's no recommendation today to be Dickensian. Why do we carry on?
Well, like so many things Victorian, the paddler has its advantages. No other
boats so big and so powerful can get into such shallow water.

"It's handy for getting on and off piers" said Mr Rowles.

"One of ours runs up onto the beach" added Mr Gill (the
Consul)

Optimistically Mr Rowles replied "Personally I think that
they are getting popular again. We seem to be carrying more people these days."

A little wistfully, Mr Gill said "It's rather like a man
with an old car. He can't afford to sell it; he can't afford to run it; he just
has to keep using it for the pleasure it gives him."

The Bristol Queen's overhaul was
originally scheduled to be completed in January but it did not turn out like
that. December was a cold and foggy month with fitful snow falls here and there.
A huge anticyclone then set itself up over Scandinavia driving Artic wind
southwards and, by the end of the month, the UK, including Weymouth, a town not
much generally snowed upon, was covered in deep drifts in some places as
high as twenty feet. In the ensuing transport chaos, British
Railways managed to misplace a goods wagon containing the new set of boiler
tubes destined for the Bristol Queen at Weymouth.

For all worried that our weather is
getting more extreme than ever these days, it is re-assuring to remember
1962/63. It was cold, that winter. Very cold. There was snow that winter. And
lots of it. It was so bad that the Thames froze a mile out to sea at Herne Bay
and many rivers, including the Medway and Humber, froze over. And it went on
week after week after perishing week chilling the interiors of the nation's
houses, houses which had never had the benefit of the sort of insulation to keep
the cold out which is normal in more often snowed upon lands.

It was almost the coldest winter on
record with only 1683/84 significantly colder and only 1739/40 marginally so. We
have never seen a winter like it since. Even those cold ones in the last couple
of years came nowhere near it.

With the anticyclone seeming to have
rooted itself permanently in the best possible position to send arctic winds our
way, more snow fell in February and it was not until early March that the thaw
eventually set in, an event greeted by much national rejoicing up and down the
land as temperatures soared to 17C and hats, gloves and snow boots were
abandoned for the first time in months.

The missing boiler tubes were eventually
located, directed correctly and installed. The rest of the refit work, which
included fitting new inner funnels, was finished. And Bristol Queen
finally sailed out through the Town Bridge at Weymouth outward bound for the
Bristol Channel on 25th April, (pictured above) three months late.

It had been a difficult winter but it
had all worked out well in the end.

So well, in fact, that there were hopes
that two "foreign" paddle steamers visiting Weymouth for overhaul that year
might bode well for the future. Perhaps next year there might be three? Perhaps
the Ryde or the Cardiff Queen or, wonder of wonders, what about a
giant from the Clyde? Maybe the Jeanie Deans?

But no. Such joy was not to be. No more
new paddlers came. And the Sandown and the Bristol Queen turned
out to bethe last paddle steamers from "foreign parts" to come to
Weymouth for a refit by Cosens.